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George Stinney’s Conviction Tossed Out … 70 Years After Execution

George Stinney in 1944.Credit SC Department of Archives and History, via Associated Press

Seventy years after he was executed in South Carolina, George Stinney’s conviction was vacated by a state judge Wednesday on the grounds that he had not received a fair trial.

Stinney, a 14-year-old black boy, was arrested in March 1944 for the murder of two white girls in Clarendon County, S.C. In less than three months, he was tried, convicted and put to death.
He was the youngest person to be executed in the U.S. in the 20th century. Reports from the execution chamber said he was so small that the jolt of electricity knocked the mask from his face.

In a 28-page order, Judge Carmen T. Mullen — who heard testimony on the case in January — did not rule on the merits of the murder charges against Stinney, but found that there were “fundamental, constitutional violations of due process” across the board.

Indeed, nothing about Stinney’s case came close to meeting basic constitutional requirements.

He was arrested without a warrant and questioned without a lawyer.

The lawyer eventually appointed to defend him was a tax commissioner who had never before represented a criminal defendant.

The only evidence against him was the word of the local police chief who said he had confessed.

Stinney’s entire capital trial lasted three hours. His lawyer neither cross-examined the prosecution’s witnesses nor called any witnesses for the defense.

The jury — all white in a county that was almost three-quarters black — convicted and condemned him in 10 minutes. There were no appeals.

Judge Mullen found fault on all of these counts. Regarding the confession, she wrote, “it is highly likely that the Defendant was coerced into confessing to the crimes due to the power differential between his position as a fourteen-year-old black male apprehended and questioned by white, uniformed law enforcement in a small, segregated mill town in South Carolina.”

She also found that Stinney’s constitutional rights were violated by a lawyer who was the “essence” of ineffectiveness, and by the empaneling of an all-white jury.

George Stinney had the bad luck to face trial before the Supreme Court decided many of the landmark cases that have clarified or expanded constitutional protections for criminal defendants. To name just a few: Strickland v. Washington, which in 1984 set the standard for determining if a lawyer has been effective; Batson v. Kentucky, from 1986, which made it easier to prove racial discrimination in jury selection; and Roper v. Simmons, from 2005, which barred the execution of those who were minors at the time of their crime.

In that sense, it’s comforting to look back over seven decades and say that this was a product of the “old South Carolina.” But in the muddy swamps of capital litigation blacks still make up one-third of all those on death row around the country, and a black defendant convicted of killing a white person is still nearly 10 times as likely to be sentenced to death as a white defendant convicted of killing a black person.